As most of you know, education has always been a top legislative and personal priority for me. Ensuring quality education is the primary duty of the legislature and for the most part our local schools work because of the partnership forged between state and local government. Frankly, the state has not always lived up to its fiscal responsibility and occasionally the relationship between the state and locality has been strained, but there is never any question that providing the best for our children is at the cored of the interaction. I am, however, increasingly concerned about the further burdens that come with the federal requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The idea behind NCLB is to build an assessment structure and a remediation system to improve student achievement. NCLB requires more in class-time of students and more out-of-class time for teachers, without acknowledging the need for additional funding. The federal government funds approximately 7% of Virginia’s education budget yet, with this Act, mandates additional extensive testing and reporting while including no new dollars.

Virginia already faces a growing gap in education funding. A study published in 2002 by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) found that virtually every school district raises and spends far more local dollars because the state has consistently fallen behind in its fair share. The recently implemented Standards of Learning testing has given the state a good benchmark for student assessment but the program has also brought its own changes and reorganization at the local level. Now we have another entity, the federal government, telling us what must be done without providing the resources to make it happen.

The same JLARC study mentioned earlier revealed what we have known for some time—the strongest predictor of a school’s performance is the percentage of students living in poverty. We know that poverty is a barrier to learning, and school divisions with the highest poverty levels have the hardest time recruiting and retaining teachers and the most students with special needs and high-risk factors.

Again, there is no doubt the motivation behind NCLB is an admirable attempt to improve schools, but we know from decades of experience that schools and communities are diverse and their needs are best understood and met by the local educators, parents and elected officials on the front lines. Dictating from afar while offering nothing to subsidize the demands is not in the best interests of our schools or students. It will, I feel certain, remain the on-going responsibility of state and local government to give our children the best start possible while they weave their way through the intervention of outside federal “experts.”

Along with education, taxes are always on the table during every legislative session. No one wants to be responsible for levying or increasing them and everyone talks about cutting them. Legislators have even found ways to avoid the “T” word with substitutions like fees, tolls or charges. But whatever the term, raising revenue remains, in various forms, a part of the discussion. This year the notorious Car Tax has raised one of its nine heads. Following the monumental miscalculations in cost that exposed the elimination of the car tax as a catchy campaign phrase and a poor way to manage government, the General Assembly, facing billions in red ink, halted the hemorrhage of car tax relief at 70% and turned to other ways of addressing the statewide deficit. Now some legislators want to finish the original idea by phasing out the reminder of the car tax over the next six years. On the surface it sounds like a great idea—who doesn’t love a tax cut? It is actually a good idea for folks who live in the urban areas of northern Virginia or the Tidewater. No matter how you measure it, the car tax rebate puts more money into the hands of our wealthiest localities while providing a pittance for people in Alleghany, Bath, Craig, Giles or Montgomery Counties—the core of the 12 th District. It is a “no new taxes” pledge that sounds good to voters unless they look at the actual return on their dollar. I doubt that anyone is my area would be seriously tempted to buy a higher-end car based on their rebate from the car tax. Sadly, the car tax bill has become a political issue with divisions along regional lines. The burning question is, of course, what will work best for the future of the Commonwealth?